When I woke up this morning, four of the Pipevine STs had hatched. That's the first step to being a successful butterfly so hooray!
I didn't mean to stay at MOSI very long but I ended up there for three hours. Mostly I was just talking to people so it wasn't too high-impact. We had a pretty good crowd for Sunday morning. Lots of interesting people, too. There was a "holistic" (her word) lady who loved our medicinal garden which is planted in our Historic Tree Grove under the Clara Barton Redbud tree (she founded the Red Cross). I also talked to a lady whose father researched and helped preserve habitat for the Florida Scrub Jay which is endemic to Florida. There's been a push lately to get it named the official state bird (instead of the Mockingbird) and we both agreed it needed to be changed. I also got to scare her daughter by showing her a Black Swallowtail caterpillar's osmeterium! We all laughed. You meet a lot of neat people at the museum and it's fun talking plants and butterflies with them. True fact - two people today asked me where I got my entomology degree from. I pointed to my University of Pennsylvania shirt and said I have an economics degree from the Wharton School. One guy asked me how I learned all this and I said books, the internet, and trial and error. And wonderful people on the forum!
The flight cage was not very diverse today. It was all Monarchs and Zebra Longwings with the exception of one Gulf Fritillary I released and one Julia (that I couldn't get a picture of). You know how I'm always saying Zebra Longwings love Jatropha - here's proof!
Here's a beat-up male Monarch.
Here's the one Gulf Fritillary I released.
I took this picture because I thought the coreopsis was really pretty but there's a Zebra Longwing on it so it counts, right?
This is a dead Polydamas. I was trying to show how when a butterfly dies of natural causes, they tend to bend their wings in just a bit and fold their legs up. Don't know why they die in this position; it just works that way.
This came out a little blurry but this is the Black Swallowtail I scared the girl with. It was actually very nice for a Black ST. They usually stinkhorn and rear back and smear it all over my finger but this one just politely stuck them out and didn't even lean back on me.
I released a ton of Zebra Longwings today and some weren't done drying so I hung them up in one of the trees. It didn't take long for the males to come swooping in and check out the females.
Back home I tried to get a picture of the tiny Pipevine ST cats.
Saw this skipper out in the butterfly garden. Skippers don't get enough love from the butterfly community, I think.
The Pipevine Swallowtail mother was out laying eggs again. I'm not sure if this is the same one. Yesterday, she was missing part of her wing but this one is missing an even bigger chunk.
I found about ten more eggs to rescue from the Dutchman's Pipevine. And I found these two Pipevine ST caterpillars! I think I got them before they ate any of the plant. So now I have six caterpillars and a bunch of eggs. Oh, and I also found a Spicebush egg that I apparently missed yesterday so now I have five of those.
